In Perl circles, modules and object-oriented programming are
often spoken of in the same breath. But
just because the programmer has written a package and a subroutine
doesn't mean that the code is objectified.

A module that describes
a class must contain a special subroutine to create an object. (Each
object that is created is an
instance
of a class.) This
subroutine is called a
constructor
. (Often the constructor
is named
new
,
but
Create
is also used in Win32 classes.) The constructor
creates a new object and returns a reference to it. This reference is
a regular scalar variable, except that it refers to some underlying
object that knows what class it belongs to. In your programs, you will
use the reference to manipulate the object.

Methods
are subroutines that expect an object reference as a
first argument, such as:

Objects have a specific set of available methods within their class, but
they also inherit methods from their parent class, if they have one.

Objects are destroyed when the last reference to them goes away. You
can control this capture before the object is destroyed with the
DESTROY
method. The
DESTROY
method should be defined
somewhere in the class. You do not call
DESTROY
explicitly; it will
be called at an appropriate time. Object references contained in the
current object will be freed when the current object is freed.
Most of the time you won't need to explicitly destroy an object, but
there are occasions where you should, such as when you are done with
a socket object.